The Apple iPad continues to dominate the US tablet market, according to online advertising network Chitika, although other players are starting to bite at its share.

According to the Chitika Insights report (PDF) for January, Apple's products account for 78.2 percent of tablet web traffic it observed. The figures are drawn from US and Canadian traffic to about 300,000 websites that use Chitika advertising, resulting in a sample size of about 300 million page impressions.

Although Apple is the dominant leader, its figures fell from its 81 percent stranglehold the previous year. Instead, Samsung has increased its market share from 3.9 percent to 6.1 percent, with Chitika stating that this may be a sign the company is breaking through with its strategy to target the tablet market.

Google has increased its share marginally from 1.7 percent to 1.9 percent, with Chitika noting that its Nexus line of tablets has remained relatively stable. But Microsoft has gone from 0.4 percent to 1.7 percent, more than quadrupling its share, which Chitika put down to increased use of Microsoft's Surface RT and Surface 2 products.

Amazon is in second place, but did not grow or lose any of its market share of 7.7 percent.

BlackBerry, Motorola, Toshiba, Acer, and Asus each command less than 1 percent of the market, and all of them saw their share decline by fractions of a percent. The only company with less than 1 percent market share that actually grew in the past year was HP, and even then, it only grew its 0.1 percent share to 0.2 percent.